Just one day after reports surfaced that staffers at the New York Times sports desk sent a letter to management demanding information about the future of the paper’s sports section, they got their answer.
The New York Times on Monday announced that it will be disbanding its sports department, shifting responsibilities for sports coverage to The Athletic, the subscription-based outlet the paper acquired for $550m in 2022.
The Times sports desk has a storied history dating back to the 19th century when the paper covered the first Olympics in Athens, Greece. Since 1927, the paper has published the highly-regarded Sports of the Times column, which produced three Pulitzer Prize winners: Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson. However, the Times sports section has fallen victim to the economic realities of print media in recent years, no longer publishing a daily sports page since 2020.
The move to disband the sports desk marks a continued shift in strategy for sports coverage at the Times. Earlier this year, the Times let go of around 20 reporters at The Athletic, citing a move away from local beats in favor of reporting that appeals to regional or league-wide audiences. The Athletic will now contribute to Times sports coverage across all platforms, print and digital.
Since the purchase last year, The Athletic has tripled its subscriber base to more than three million, but that growth does not tell the whole story. The publication reported losses of $7.8 million in Q1 2023, and new subscriber numbers are likely owing to a combination of bundling with other Times products and cheap promotional rates.
Given the large upfront investment, some sort of integration between the Times and The Athletic seemed inevitable; operating two separate sports divisions under one umbrella was untenable. That the Times would choose to disband its sports section and reassign reporters to different beats would nonetheless qualify as unexpected.
The decision to reassign these reporters elsewhere is likely due to the recent agreement between the Times and the NewsGuild union preventing layoffs in the short term. The Athletic, by contrast, is not unionized — a characteristic that the Times might find attractive after the heated negotiation earlier this year.
Signatories of the letter sent over the weekend include NFL writers Tyler Kepner and Ken Belson, both of which have been with the Times sports section for over a decade; Jenny Vrentas, an enterprise reporter who has extensively covered the Deshaun Watson story; and Juliet Macur, a reporter with the Times sports section since 2004. Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Deputy Managing Editor Monica Drake wrote in an email to staffers Monday that the publication plans “to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large.”
Such reporting was already a focus of the Times sports desk, be it a human-interest profile or its groundbreaking reporting on concussions in the NFL. Now, the paper will be banking on a reduced staff at The Athletic, and other departments such as the business desk at the Times to fill the void once occupied by the sports desk. Ultimately, the goal will be to bolster subscriptions, but with over three million subscribers already and no profit to be had, one has to wonder if the half-billion dollar investment was ever a good acquisition in the first place.
